This spring at The Daily’s Fashion Los Angeles Awards at The Beverly Hills Hotel, the event kicked off with cocktails and a memorable DJ set from Danny Fujikawa and Michael Fujikawa aka The Fuji Brothers. Talk about a party trick! The brothers brought the event to a new level with their mix of classics and contagious good energy. The Daily recently rung them up to talk about their history as artists, where they found their love of music, and how they get a crowd going.
Michael: We are from sunny Santa Monica, California, and we grew up in a kind of progressive, mixed-race, parents were from the sixties, hard-working folks who raised us with a love of love and a lot of encouragement to pursue our various passions. Would you agree, Dan?
Danny: I absolutely agree, and we currently reside back on the West Side as well. Michael’s in Santa Monica and I’m in the Palisades, so we’re West Side LA boys at heart, born and raised, and we found our way back to raise our own families.
Michael: Our mom was more of a child of the 70’s because she was born in 55’. Our Dad was definitely a 60’s guy. He went to the Dodgers stadium to see The Beatles, and our Grandmother, Dad’s mom, was a musician. She played the piano. Not the type of musician that would entertain or even want to talk about music, but she had skills. Our Dad did not train as a musician, but he loved to sing. Our parents got divorced when we were young, and so he would pick us up, and we spent some time in the car, and the six CD changer in the trunk, was both the bane of our existence, and that was literally the treasure trove. We had to determine which six CD’s were in that trunk before we started driving somewhere because you couldn’t go into the trunk while you already started driving. We would listen to Steely Dan, The Beatles, Alanis Morisette had just dropped, Jagged Little Pill, and that was something my Dad had wanted to listen to a lot. Phil Collins was a big one, so he would play music like that and we would sing along. We would sing with him, and there’s other places too. I remember Danny when we found Dad’s record collection.
Danny: It was the record collection that we grew up with in our house. In our front entry in this bench, there was a storage kind of container that was filled with records from the sixties. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, The Beatles, Moody Blues, Simon and Garfunkel, your quintessential sixties collection. Our Dad went to Stanford in the sixties, so he was in the Bay Area. Although he practiced studying law, and was kind of on the straight narrow super highly academic, also a world-class athlete as well, but he liked to party, and he liked to hangout .Our musical ability and taste mainly comes from our Dad’s side.
Michael: And from Mom, too. We grew up playing the piano. I didn’t like the piano teacher. I wasn’t a child prodigy. Danny was prodigious when it came to the piano and all things technical, but I always played the drums. I have very vivid memories of being really young, like almost pre-verbal and there are photos to prove it, but setting up pots and pans and things to intentionally play drums. I’ve actually never had a proper drum lesson. It’s self-taught, but I didn’t start playing the drums until I was in college. Danny was more musical than I am.
Danny: Michael said I kind of took the reins because we started playing music with a friend of ours, and that was kind of the initial iteration of the band Chief. It was…